Category Archives: Investigating Choice Time: Inquiry, Exploration, and Play

early childhood education, children, play

A MATCH OF A QUESTION THAT SHOULD START A FIRE!

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I was recently at a meeting of 19 New York City and New Jersey educators who are preparing for a trip to Reggio Emilia, Italy. We will be part of a larger group of 69 educators from around the country and also from international schools in places as far away as Mumbai and Singapore.

Our meeting drifted towards a discussion instigated by a question posed by a visitor from the New York City Department of Education. “Could you share thoughts on how the Common Core standards are impacting on the your classrooms?” Anyone who is at all involved in education can probably imagine the fire that this match of a question set off. The main sticking point seemed to be the way that constant assessments consistently got in the way of teaching.

Before having the discussion about testing, assessment and the common core, we viewed some wonderful segments from a video, An Amusement Park for Birds, where we saw five and six year old children in Reggio Emilia take part in an exciting, intellectually, and creatively challenging project. During our talk about assessment, it became apparent that the rich inquiry-based kind of project described in the video could not take place in a classroom where so much time is spent on testing and test-prep.

When I returned home later in the evening, I recalled an email that I had recently received from a kindergarten teacher working in a New York City public school.

“Assessments are killing me. I have spent the past month doing the TC assessments and especially running records. It takes up ALL of my time with the kids because I have to get them done. And, as you know, in K, it is all done one on one. So I have to sit with a child while the rest of the class is on their own. At the same time I’m supposed to be teaching, conferring, conferencing, doing small groups. There is no time set aside specifically for these assessments, so they go on during “teaching time.” When there is ONE adult in the classroom with 19-25 kids, I don’t know how these assessments are supposed to be realistically done. Even with my student teacher in the room…I am responsible for the assessments. I don’t allow my student teacher to assess because I like to know exactly how my student answers the questions.… (And, yes, I will sadly admit, that I do assess during choice time. Not because I want to but because I don’t have much of a choice. They HAVE to get done.)”

According to a study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, is on the rise, with nearly one in 10 American children receiving an ADHD diagnosis. If we add the speeded up curriculum imposed by the Common Core standards coupled with and increase in testing and classroom assessments, then the increase in ADHD does not seem so remarkable.

I can’t help wondering why parents are not up in arms over the standardized testing and resulting standardization of instruction? I’m sure that there isn’t a simple answer to this question but, nevertheless, it really does disturb me. I know that in some areas, parents are beginning to be more active in opposing the standardized testing. I do wonder, however, if they are also aware of the amount of classroom time teachers are spending throughout the year on a variety of assessments? I also wonder if they are aware of how the common core state standards are jacking up the curriculum so that kindergarten children are being asked to master what is developmentally appropriate for first and second graders and so on through the grades? What is the purpose of having kindergarten children:

“Count to 100 by ones and by tens.

Count forward beginning from a given number within the known sequence (instead of having to begin at 1).

Count to answer “how many?” questions about as many as 20 things arranged in a line, a rectangular array, or a circle, or as many as 10 things in a scattered configuration; given a number from 1-20, count out that many objects.

Work with numbers 11-19 to gain foundations for place value.

Compose and decompose numbers from 11 to 19 into ten ones and some further ones, e.g., by using objects or drawings, and record each composition or decomposition by a drawing or equation (e.g., 18 = 10 + 8); understand that these numbers are composed of ten ones and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, or nine ones.”

I’m wondering how we, the educators, can inform parents about what is really happening in schools today? Below is a wonderful letter, written by a brave and concerned principal. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if more administrators would reach out to parents in a similarly forthright fashion?

September 4, 2012
Dear Parents,
On behalf of the teachers and staff of the Wantagh Elementary School, I would like to welcome you back to school. I anticipate that the 2012-13 academic year will prove to be an exciting year.
…One significant issue as we move into this new school year is that we will, at times, find it difficult if not impossible to teach authentic application of concepts and skills with an eye towards relevancy. What we will be teaching students is to be effective test takers; a skill that does not necessarily translate into critical thinking – a skill set that is necessary at the college level and beyond. This will inevitably conflict with authentic educational practice – true teaching.
Unfortunately, if educators want to survive in the new, Albany-created bureaucratic mess that is standardized assessments to measure teacher performance, paramount to anything else, we must focus on getting kids ready for the state assessments. This is what happens when non-educators like our governor and state legislators, textbook publishing companies (who create the assessments for our state and reap millions of our tax dollars by doing so), our NYS Board of Regents, and a state teachers’ union president get involved in creating what they perceive as desirable educational outcomes and decide how to achieve and measure them.
Where were the opinions of teachers, principals, and superintendents? None were asked to participate in the establishment of our new state assessment parameters. Today, statisticians are making educational decisions in New York State that will impact your children for years to come. Standardized assessment has grown exponentially. For example, last year New York State fourth graders, who are nine or ten years old, were subjected to roughly 675 minutes (over 11 hours) of state assessments which does not include state field testing.
This year there will be a state mandated pre-test in September and a second mandated pre-test in January for all kindergarten through fifth grade students in school. In April, kindergarten through fifth grade students will take the last test [assessment] for the year.

Excessive testing is unhealthy.
When I went to school I was never over-tested and subsequently labeled with an insidious number that ranked or placed me at a Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 or Level 4 as we do today. Do you want your child to know their assigned ‘Level’? What would the impact be on their self-esteem and self-worth at such a young age?

Of additional concern to me is the relationship between children and their teacher as we move into an era where teacher job status is based upon student assessment scores. Guess what, some children will become more desirable than others to have in class! And, conversely, others will be less desirable. There, I wrote it! That concept is blasphemy in our school where teachers live to prepare children to be productive learners and members of society.
Teachers state-wide are worried that their relationship with students might change when they are evaluated based upon their students’ test scores. Teachers want to educate students, not test prep them for job security. Additionally, what should be shocking to you as a parent is that state and national databases are being created in order to analyze and store students’ test scores – your child’s assessment results and your child’s school attendance! Do you realize that the state has mandated that classroom teachers must take attendance during every math, ELA, social studies and science lesson – everyone, every day for the entire school year! Those records are sent to the state and become statistically part of the teacher evaluation process. It will no longer be enough that your child ‘was in school.’ Rather, if he or she was at a band lesson or out of the room for extra help in reading and a math lesson was taking place in class, he or she will be noted as absent from that instruction. That will be factored into the teacher evaluation. Thinking of taking your child to Disney World for a week during the school year or leaving a day or two early for a long weekend skiing? Think again! Those absences will be recorded as illegal, missed seat time and sent to the state – as mandated by the state.
This is all part of the massive, multi-million tax-payer dollar teacher evaluation processes started by our Commissioner of Education, our governor, and our state legislators and fully supported by statisticians employed by the state and assessment-making companies. No one in Albany is selecting to see the end of the journey; that 98 percent of the students graduating from Wantagh Schools go on to two- and four-year colleges. Their myopic view is focused on the ‘parts’, not the whole.
Who will eventually suffer? Your children!

The balance must now be struck between maintaining the special nature of an elementary school setting and the cold and calculating final analysis rendered by statistics. The use of assessment data to drive instruction is a tenet of good educational practices. The use of assessment data to render a yearly prognostication of teacher competency is ridiculous.
You have the greatest impact on your child’s school performance. Each teacher only has your children for 180 days per year and for less than six hours per day [minus lunch and recess times, art, music, and physical education classes]. It is our expectation that as partners in your child’s education, you will be doing your part as well.
As part of any evaluation of student performance, Albany must simultaneously be asking parents the following questions: 

Does your child read at home each day for at least twenty minutes? 

Do you read to your child every day? 

Are math facts gone over daily until they are known automatically?

Is there a quiet location in the house for homework time and do you check your child’s homework each night? 

Is your child sent to school ready for the day with a good breakfast following at least eight hours of sleep? 

Are after school activities monitored so that your child is not ‘overbooked’ and their stamina compromised? 

Is your child in school daily [except when they are sick] and not taken out of school for any reason other than illness?
We will continue to have field trips, assemblies, and special school events but some events will be curtailed or rescheduled with an eye toward prudent times during the school year to maximize student seat time. However, it is unmistakable that we have entered into a new era of educational practice with higher stakes than ever before. 

I look forward to working with you and your child as we start our new school year because….together we make a difference.

Thank you.

Don Sternberg, Ed.D.

Principal
[1]By Don Sternberg, Ed.D., Wantagh Elementary School, and SAANYS 2009 Elementary Principal of the Year

Where Is the Rage?

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Five, overall, is a time of great happiness.
Life is “good” says the five year old.
Chip Wood, Yardsticks

Ah, but if it could be true that the school life of a five-year-old was filled with great happiness!

This week I received an email from a kindergarten teacher working in a South Bronx, New York public school. After teaching pre-kindergarten for the last few years, she was now moving up to kindergarten. At her request, we met during the summer vacation to plan out a Playground Study for the start of the school year. Not having heard from her, I emailed her to find out how the study was progressing and this is her response:

“In answer to your question: currently 22 children that are great BUT there is reading workshop, writing workshop, everyday math, social studies and science…with formative assessments, summative assessments for each subject, each unit…performance tasks, curriculum mapping, Fundations, conferring, ECLAS, and of course the COMMON CORE…. and more I’m probably forgetting. If it weren’t so exhausting I’d think it’s hilarious. The object seems to be to give us so much to do that both we and the system implode and be declared broken and the corporations march in to the “rescue”. We DO have choice time which saves the day. The children are literally in ecstasy when they get to play. I began to do the playground study but frankly Renee, right now I can’t take on one more thing. Since this is all new to me I’m learning to manage just the million things I’m supposed to do…including writing down the CC standards for each lesson each day, everyday of the week. That alone takes several hours. Fortunately my colleagues found a $25 lesson plan app that lets you just click on the CC standard!!! See? Someone else is making money off of this absurdity. On the other hand I LOVE working with this age…the children are so enthusiastic and able and easy to motivate. I just hope I don’t get “in trouble” for too much singing.”

*****

The NAEYC position statements on developmentally appropriate practices (Bredekamp, 1986; Bredekamp & Copple, 1997; NAEYC, 2009) have addressed developmentally inappropriate and problematic practices such as predominantly teacher-directed tasks, highly structured classes, large group work, paper/pencil tasks, rote learning, direct teaching of discrete skills, punishment, extrinsic rewards, and standardized assessment. These examples stand in contrast to developmentally appropriate practices, such as encouragement of active exploration, a predominance of concrete experiences, positive guidance, and interactions that promote healthy self-esteem and positive feelings toward school.
Lori A. Jackson,Observing Children’s Stress Behaviors in a Kindergarten Classroom

*****

After reading the email from the Bronx teacher, I began to think about other classrooms around the city. Last year I spent time in Bill Fulbrecht’s kindergarten class in Park Slope, an upscale Brooklyn, NY neighborhood. Bill spends an hour each day on Choice Time and he takes his children out to the schoolyard to play every day. Although he has complained to me about the time spent on completing many assessments, he still has some freedom to give children many opportunities for play and exploration during the course of the school day. But is this happening around the city? What is happening in schools where there are mainly children who are eligible for free lunch and who come from homes where families are struggling to just ‘get by’? I decided to send out a few more emails.

Some years ago I had the opportunity to work with a wonderfully dedicated and enthusiastic young first grade teacher in a school in East Flatbush Brooklyn, New York. This year he is teaching kindergarten. Like the teacher in the Bronx, he too contacted me this summer for some ideas about creating an exciting inquiry-based curriculum for his kindergarteners. His school population is mainly African-American. About ¾ of the children in the school are eligible for free lunch.

In response to my email, I received his kindergarten schedule along with some of his comments. Luckily for the children, they have a teacher who tries in every way that he can to add some joy and excitement to their day in school. However, as you can see by his schedule, this is quite a challenge!

“I must admit; as per the common core curriculum and its push for rigor, the majority of the school day is spent on academics.
This is an average day in my classroom.
8:00 to 8:20:  Morning routine. (calendar routines, morning message, poem and chants )
8:20 to 10:05:  Literacy workshop ( shared reading, read aloud, Fundations phonics, independent reading, guided reading) Students will work in their literacy stations during guided reading.
10:05 to 10:55:  Lunch
10:55 to 11:40:  Math workshop
11:45 to 12:40:  Cluster
12:45 to 1:30:  Writers workshop
1:35 to 2:23 Social studies or science
Choice time is usually squeezed into the end of the day for 20 minutes. That is my day in a nutshell.
I plan lessons that allow the student to work in groups to explore and inquire. I have noticed the importance of play especially since I moved to kindergarten.
Unfortunately, with the new expectations there is little time left in the day to allow choice time. Teachers feel the pressure to push and pressure their students to work with rigor.
Assessments
September is all about assessing our students. I assess while the students are in literacy stations and I also take students out of their cluster specials to assess. We have to do assessments in both literacy and math.
Playground
A specific 45 minutes weekly block is planned by the school for the pre-K to first grade students. Student occasionally get to play for 10 minutes during their lunch break. Unfortunately recess is over before it gets started.”

*****

There is a great deal of evidence that the road to mastery of any subject is guided by play. Learning a subject by rote can take one only so far.
Stuart Brown, M.D. with Christopher Vaughan, founder of the National Institute for Play
Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul

*****

How is someone who is steeped in the theories and beliefs of good early childhood education supposed to react to the reality of contemporary kindergarten education? Many teachers who have had years of experience teaching young children, using developmentally appropriate and intellectually challenging practices are either taking an earlier-than-expected retirement or moving out of the grade.

My friend Herb Bleich came to teaching as a second career. He brought his astute intellect, his love of children, his passion for music and his joy of life to his classroom. In his Central Harlem, New York public school his kindergarten classroom was an oasis of joy. A few years ago, however, he saw clearly the handwriting on the wall and realized that the nature of his kindergarten program was going to be forced to change. Rather than do that, he decided to teach pre-kindergarten. I emailed Herb and asked if he too could share his thoughts. Here is his response:

“Despite the fact that I really loved kindergarten, I certainly felt it was a never- ending rat race to keep up with everything. One thing that stands out in my mind was the rush everyday to check homework during lunch, and supply new homework. I remember thinking that if I could go to pre-k, the pressure would be so much less, and I could keep it up forever. (It is less, but as always I seem to put pressure on myself, and lately official pressure is creeping in as well.)

In terms of your questions, I managed during my five years in kindergarten to always start the day with an hour of choice time. The other main blocks were readers’ workshop, writers’ workshop, and math. The class had limited outdoor play during the lunch period. The main assessment as I remember was E-CLAS, which I did during prep. I was under your influence during those years, and my administration left me pretty much alone.
However, my kindergarten experience ended seven years ago, and today it’s a totally different story. Choice time is gone in our K classes, the day is divided into mandated blocks as you would suspect, and yes, lots of class time is devoted to assessment (eg., frequent F & P reading levels, math and ELA unit tests).

Incidentally, about a year after I left kindergarten some sage from the District visited the school and instructed that the kindergartens’ blocks should be thrown away; time needed to be devoted to academics. (I salvaged them from the trash.)

I’ve always felt I left kindergarten just in time.”

*****

Play is far older than humans. It’s so familiar to us, so deeply ingrained in the matrix of our childhood, that we take it for granted. But consider this: ants don’t play. They don’t need to. Programmed for certain behaviors, they automatically perform them from birth. Learning through repetition, honed skills, and ingenuity isn’t required in their heritage. The more an animal needs to learn in order to survive, the more it needs to play…Play is widespread among animals because it invites problem-solving, allowing a creature to test its limits and develop strategies. In a dangerous world, where dramas change daily, survival belongs to the agile not the idle. We may think of play as optional, a casual activity. But play is fundamental to evolution. Without play, humans and many other animals would perish.

Diane Ackerman, Deep Play
*****

Where is the rage against this rigid, joyless curriculum?

Out of the Box

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Last week, while I was rushing around getting ready to leave for work, I was stopped in my tracks by a snippet of an NPR radio announcement playing in the background. The broadcaster was speaking about an upcoming interview with Paul Tough that was going to be aired later in the day. The words that I heard were something like, “curiosity and self control are better predictors of success than intelligence and test scores.”

This statement lingered in my mind throughout the day. It was reminiscent of a wonderful keynote address that I heard at an early childhood conference a few years ago. The speaker was the astrophysicist and director of New York City’s Hayden Planetarium, Neill deGrasse Tyson. His speech was unlike any other keynote that I’d heard before and I literally got goose bumps listening to him. His major point was that when he, or any other executive, interviewed a potential worker, he was never interested in the persons test scores or grade point average from high school or college. What he looked for in a candidate was the ability to think creatively and, as he said, “out of the box”. He also looked for someone with good social skills.

Schools today are being pressured to place their major emphasis on prepping students for standardized tests and pushing them towards reaching some predetermined reading levels which MUST be met by the end of the school year. Perhaps high test scores and reading levels can be achieved on a yearly timeline but at what cost to the child and to society?

If we consider the wise words of Mr. Tough and Mr. Tyson, we might question whether or not we are really preparing children to be successful adults when we implement curriculums that drain them of their creativity and eliminate opportunities for activities that encourage and enhance the development of social skills?

When I first saw this video of Caine’s Arcade on the Internet, it provoked me towards considering these thoughts: How did Caine think up this incredible project? What allowed him to stay with it for such a long time? What might have prevented him from (no pun intended) thinking out of the box? How can schools support this type of thinking and stamina? Could Caine have thought this up, worked through problems and produced this marvelous project if he had to keep to a timetable for completing it?

I wonder….

DEFENDING THE EARLY YEARS

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This is the platform for Early Childhood, presented at the Save Our Schools People’s Convention in Washington D.C..

Educators, parents, and anyone with concerns about the education of young children, what are your thoughts about this document?

DEY Early Childhood Platform
Posted on August 13, 2012 by geralyndeyproject
Note: DEY’s Senior Adviser Nancy Carlsson-Paige and our National Advisory Board member Deborah Meier recently presented our early childhood platform at the Save Our Schools People’s Education Convention, where folks were hugely supportive and helped to brainstorm ways to use the platform as we move forward.

Platform for Early Childhood Education

There has been an increasing pushdown of the academic skills to 3, 4 and 5 year olds that used to be associated with 1st – 3rd graders. This results in fewer of the direct play and hands-on experiences that lay the foundations for later academic success. At the same time, there is an increasing over-focus on rote academic skills in the early elementary grades. This includes more and more teacher talk rather than child talk in early childhood classrooms and often involves teacher-led instruction focused largely on memorizing facts and information. Young children need to see facts within meaningful contexts, to invent their own ideas and problems to explore and solve, to share their own solutions. These practices reflect a loss of trust in the intellectual capacities of young children – and an institutionalized crushing of their insatiable love of learning.

We’re forgetting that human beings are, from the moment they are born, experts at learning. Before they enter school, they have already discovered vast worlds of language and knowledge. Human beings are uniquely designed to be makers and creators – artists and craftsmen. And intellectuals.

The majority of early childhood classrooms today are driven by myriad of developmentally inappropriate standards-based tests and check lists that ignore children’s needs, capacities and cultures, and do not honor their uniqueness as learners. This brings great harm to our nation’s children by portraying them as deficient. The heaviest burden falls on those who live in poverty and with the fewest resources. As these trends take hold there has been a dumbing down of teaching and teacher knowledge, which is being increasingly replaced by commercial scripts that can be followed mindlessly. Less prepared teachers who are more willing to follow commercial scripts and manage data are entering the field of early childhood at the same time that increasingly frustrated experienced teachers are leaving. Older mentors who once wisely guided young teachers are fast disappearing.

If one purpose of public education, especially in a democracy, is to develop our capacity to exercise wise judgment when confronted with real world dilemmas, then we need to encourage young children to develop good judgment. They need adult models who demonstrate what exercising judgment is all about and who encourage children to ask questions, apply what they already know to new situations, use their imaginations, and think independently. In classrooms in which skills and knowledge are broken into small skill subsets and factlets and taught directly to kids, such judgment becomes suffocated from the start.

While many of the misguided practices we see in schools today took place in earlier times, especially in the education of poor children, they were not enforced by punitive state and federal policy or driven by frequent, costly, and inappropriate assessment tools, as is the case today—nor begun at such a young age.

What is the answer?
1. Eliminate labeling and ranking of children based on standardized tests. It’s long been known to experts that tests for young children have very low reliability, are dependent on too many random factors, and are impacted by class, race and home culture.

2. Use assessments that are ongoing and evolving and connected closely to observations of children, their development and learning, and to a child-centered curriculum.

3. Provide classrooms where teachers engage in well-thought out and intentional extensions/expansions of children’s play and learning in ways that demonstrate knowledge and respect for each child’s uniqueness.

4. Provide children with literacy experiences that include storytelling, quality children’s literature, and dramatic reenactments that grow out of their experiences rather than activities that isolate and drill discrete skills.

5. See and appreciate what children can do and understand without focusing on learning everything earlier. Offer classrooms where children are not praised, rewarded or criticized because they are slower or faster than others. Research tells us, earlier does not prove to be better.

6. Provide a school environment that respects the language and culture of children and their families, encourages families to take ownership, and insures that their history and experiences are included and valued.

7. Offer school schedules that provide ample time for families and school personnel to meet and work together. Including family members in meaningful ways in the school’s governance structure so that they and children feel their voices are being heard.

8. Realize the critical role of early childhood teachers, whose work is as important as that of those who teach PhD candidates, and compensate them as such. We must reverse the assumption that the younger the children we teach, the less knowledgeable and competent teachers need to be.

9. Implement a school pedagogy that understands that children are intrinsically active learners from the time they are born and that learning happens in and out of a school building in unique ways. Adults don’t need to get children “ready to learn”; they don’t have to reinforce skills and facts stressed in school at home.

10. Provide children and families with access to high quality, affordable child care and after-school care.

What Can We Do?

Take this platform to your neighbor, children’s teachers, parent groups, school board and legislative bodies. As them to support efforts to bring best practice back to the education of young children.

Stay informed and involved with the organizations that advocate for young children – such as Defending the Early Years (deyproject.org), Alliance for Childhood (allianceforchildhood.org), Save Our Schools (saveourschoolsmarch.org) and Parents Across America (parentsacrossamerica.org). (Also check out local organizations such as Citizens for Public Schools in Massachusetts citizensforpublicschools.org.)

Resist reinforcing the school’s agenda – drilling for skills – and replace it with what centuries of wisdom and research has taught us: children learn when they are deeply engaged in self-selected, self-directed and playful activities. Provide young children with space and time to play at home and in the neighborhood. You don’t need expensive toys or technology to support their development. They need the natural world, simple props, good friends and appreciative adults.

Notice and enjoy all the things the children you know CAN do.

Frustration

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Frustration: a feeling of dissatisfaction, often accompanied by anxiety or depression, resulting from unfulfilled needs or unresolved problems.

Frustration: to balk or defeat in an endeavor; to induce feelings of discouragement, to make ineffectual: bring to nothing. To impede, obstruct or to make invalid or of no effect

My right arm has been in a cast since the morning of July 7th when I tripped on my front step and clumsily crashed onto the pavement. Being right-handed, this restriction on almost every little detail of daily life has been, to put it mildly, frustrating and often humiliating.

Lucky for me, this shall pass. In a few weeks the cast will come off and I’ll begin physical therapy. I’m hoping that my physical therapist will be endowed with a wealth of patience. I know from past experience that I am no “jock” and that my body does not bounce back quickly. I hope the physical therapist will work with me on my own playing ground. I hope that I don’t experience feelings of humiliation and failure by not meeting a generically expected timeline on my road to recovery.

My experience makes me think of young children and the Common Core Standards. Should each kindergarten child be expected to “Compose and decompose numbers from 11 to 19 into ten ones and some further ones, e.g., by using objects or drawings, and record each composition or decomposition by a drawing or equation (such as 18 = 10 + 8); understand that these numbers are composed of ten ones and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, or nine ones.” by the end of the school year?

What of the children who have different styles and rates of learning? Might we be creating an environment that leads to feelings of dissatisfaction, depression and anxiety for many children when we set a time-line, complete with a numerical rating of 1,2,3 and 4, for meeting standards that can be developmentally inappropriate expectations for all children to meet at the same time?

Don’t we want children (and adults going through physical therapy!) to feel supported and believed in? Isn’t it important that we let children, and their parents, know that we have confidence that they will “Read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding” and “Isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in three-phoneme (consonant-vowel-consonant, or CVC) words” but not necessarily by a given date that has been selected by a group of people they have never met and who know nothing about each child’s particular likes, dislikes, strengths and challenges?

I know that, with time, practice, the support and encouragement of friends and family and the guidance of a patient, trained physical therapist, my hand will get strong again. It might take six months, a year or perhaps longer. But the diagnoses and expectation is that there will eventually be recovery.

Don’t we need to have similar expectations for children? We can and should have the high standards for children presented in the Common Core Standards without turning education away from the exciting challenge that it can be and into the frustrating race that it has become!

Transporting a Classroom Towards Inquiry

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I could almost hear a chorus of silent groans coming from the teachers sitting around the table in the staff room at P.S. 10 in Brooklyn. It was March 17th, 2005, my first day working as a consultant at the school. The new principal, Jett Ritorto, wanted me to introduce inquiry projects and investigative Choice Time to the kindergarten teachers. But it was mid-March and this was just one more new addition to their already over-programmed day. I wasn’t welcomed with open arms!

“We can’t do an inquiry project. This is when we start our transportation unit.”
I recognized this plea from my own not-so-long-ago days in the classroom. I had my theme, my materials, and my time-schedule all set up and then, in would walk a new staff developer with her own agenda, turning all of my plans upside down.

I assured them that we would not be dropping the transportation unit. Instead we would see what happened if we approached it in a new way. I suggested that they each go on a neighborhood walk with their class that week, with a focus on exploring the different ways that people could travel, to, from, and around their neighborhood. After the walk, they should encourage children to share their observations. This would give the teachers a sense of what the students already know and also what form of transportation seemed to interest them the most. That would allow them to narrow the focus of the class’s transportation study.

When I came back to the school the next week, I met with each teacher individually. The inclusion team, Dana Roth and Karen Byrnes, were excited and eager to share their experience with me. Their children had lots of questions about the subway and that was where they wanted to focus their study. The three of us spent the rest of the period preparing an anticipatory web, plotting out the many possibilities for a subway study. All seemed well.

Later in the week they contacted me and sadly told me that a subway study was out of the question. One of the students was confined to a wheelchair and would have to be excluded from all subway trips. They decided to switch to a bus study. I suggested, however, that they first bring the problem to the class and see what kind of solution the children came up with.

The children were outraged! “That’s not fair! Saim should be able to go on the subway just like us!” Here began a most unusual transportation study – The Wheelchair Project.

The class decided to find out more about Saim’s wheelchair and what it was like for him to move around the school and neighborhood. Saim was pleased as punch to be the center of attention (Dana said that she would not have pursued this route if the child was sensitive about being singled out).

They began the study by interviewing Saim. After the interview, they all sat around him in a circle, observing and drawing. The teachers began webbing what children already knew about wheelchairs and also collecting their “wonderings” on post-its and adding these to the web. From these activities, they decided to focus their study on movement and accessibility. These were the two areas where the children had the most interest.

News about this unusual transportation study traveled around the school like hotcakes. When the school’s physical therapist heard about the investigation, she provided the class with an unused wheelchair. This became a very popular wheelchair observation center. Children used magnifying glasses, tape measures, and detail finders (a square of black paper with a peek-hole cut in the center) to look closely at the different parts of wheelchair. They drew the wheels, the brakes, and the gears. Then they shared their drawings and ‘recordings’ with the children in the block center who were constructing their own version of a wheelchair. This chair took many days to construct. It sometimes fell over and was rebuilt often and eventually was held together with yards of masking tape!

 

 

The class visited the school bus that brought Saim to school to see how the lift helped children with walkers and wheelchairs get on and off. They interviewed the driver and also met Manny, a very affable upper-grade child who used a walker to help him move about. Manny was invited to the classroom where he was interviewed. He then gave each child an opportunity to try out his walker.

After this experience, a lift-bus was built in the block center. After a few days, it was deconstructed and the children built “a better lift bus.”

They walked took neighborhood walks, checking to see which stores and sidewalks were “wheelchair friendly.” Then they walked around the school to find out if their school was wheelchair accessible. The front of the school had lots of steps! How did Saim get into school? In an exciting moment of discovery, they found the symbol that they saw on the lift bus, along with an arrow. The class followed the arrows until they came to the ramp entrance. Problem solved!

They visited a neighborhood house that had been altered to make it wheelchair accessible and they interviewed the owner of the building.

This study certainly held the interest of the class and raised a new awareness of the challenges in Saim’s daily life. The children developed a feeling of respect for Saim and for the other children in the school who used wheelchairs, walkers and crutches.

Over the years, I have returned to the school to visit Dana Roth and I’ve always been intrigued by the variety of studies taking place in her classroom. On one visit, the children were investigating colors – inventing colors, exploring the various names of Crayola crayons and coming up with their own inventive names for their newly mixed colors. On another visit, the children were building a school in their dramatic play center, reflecting their investigation of their own school. Dana still does some thematic studies but she also listens closely to her children and develops inquiry projects based on their interests and wonderings.

I haven’t worked at the school for the past five years, but I’m going back in the fall to, as Laura Scott, the new principal, says, “Give a refresher course” in inquiry studies to keep it alive and well at the school. Let’s see what happens.

Are We Killing Kindergarten?

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I just read this article by Amanda Moreno, the Associate Director of the Marsico Institute for Early Learning and Literacy. She speaks so well to many of my concerns, so I thought that I would share it with you. That isn’t to say that I am inagreement with every point. I do think that children learn through play although I do agree that play is not a strategy for stuffing knowledge into a child.

Read the article and share thoughts.

Killing Kindergarten
by Amanda Moreno, Ph.D

I want you to know it took a lot of self-discipline not to title this post “Killing Kindergarteners.” In addition to being an early education researcher, I am also a mother of a 5-year-old currently in kindergarten, so I can tell you that is pretty much the way it feels. All around this country, families are trying to figure out why their small children already dread going to a place that was supposed to serve as a gentle transition to formal learning. They are struggling with ambivalent allegiances, not wanting to be the over-protective parent who babies their child, but at the same time not being fully convinced that their child has a behavior problem just because they don’t enjoy sitting at a desk, independently going through worksheets for a solid hour.

It has become axiomatic in my field to say that early learning expectations are a full year ahead of what they were 20 years ago. Alfie Kohn points out an even more critical piece of this puzzle when he says that “The typical American kindergarten now resembles a really bad first-grade classroom” (italics mine). Somehow I don’t think Robert Fulghum’s list of essential lessons learned in kindergarten would have the same ring to it if among “share everything” and “play fair” appeared “100 sight words,” “command of capitalization and punctuation,” and “compose and decompose numbers 11-19.” Cynicism aside, a year’s worth of additional expectations isn’t in itself the biggest problem if you have a highly skilled teacher who can individualize to suit just about any learning style, and can make just about any learning task age-appropriate and engaging. That is a huge if, I would guess, according to most kindergarteners today.

Is teaching 5-year-olds really that complex an enterprise? It is true that little kids are like sponges in that they absorb discrete pieces of knowledge daily, naturally, and without effort, such as new vocabulary, locations of things in their house, how specific toys work, and what their family dinner and bedtime routines are. But in formal learning settings — at least as they are on average in the U.S. — the game completely changes. For better or worse, the “great divider” in formal learning settings may be whether the learner can decide to tackle new tasks or problems, not because she wants to but simply because she is being asked to. Is it OK for my 5-year-old to learn about Native American history and culture? Sure it is. The parts of the eye and inner ear — why not? But there is no intrinsic motivation when the lesson emphasizes the proper spelling “Tlingit” or “cochlea” and there never will be. No, the kindergarteners who do well with this kind of task are the ones who have already developed the ability to override their intrinsic motivation. This takes more than compliance — it takes executive function, which is in part attention and memory, and in part the ability to inhibit a pre-potent response. You know, like my daughter’s pre-potent response to color with the crayon that most attracts her eye, rather than limiting her choices to the browns, yellows, and oranges that were actually found in traditional Native American garb, as the curriculum required.

This sounds awful — like the only successful kindergartener is one with a broken spirit. It wouldn’t have to be this way if the educational system were structured to accommodate the natural, normal, and highly variable rates of development that occur in early childhood. All typically developing children acquire the basics of executive function eventually. So universal a finding across cultures is this, that it came to be known as the “5-to-7 year shift” — and it is the reason why formal schooling starts around this age worldwide. In this country, the word around makes all the difference. Given the range of ages at which children enter kindergarten (there is about a 25-month spread between the youngest and oldest students), and the three-year age range within which executive function skills begin to become more adult-like, children can be anywhere between preschool and third grade when the complex set of abilities required to decide to learn comes online sufficiently well. Even after controlling for age, kindergarteners still show greater variability in executive function than either fifth graders or preschoolers, indicating there is something unique about the cognitive reorganizations that take place during this period of life.

Our educational system is not equipped to support the application of this kind of knowledge. John Medina has said, “If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you would probably design something like a classroom.”

In early childhood, when children are just beginning (and did I mention, at highly individualized rates?) to acquire the ability to focus under non-optimal circumstances and learn anyway, this is not only unproductive (as it is for learners of all ages), it is dangerous. For young children for whom intentional learning isn’t even on the radar screen yet, every day they spend sitting at a desk and filling out worksheets is like being in a foreign language immersion program with a teacher who believes they’re fluent.

This is not a debate about exploratory vs. direct instruction in the early grades, or play vs. structure, or creative learning vs. traditional academics, or any other label for this false dichotomy. Research supports both, depending on the group of children studied and methods used. While I staunchly believe that play is a human right, you don’t fix the misguided question of how to stuff knowledge into a 5-year-old’s brain simply by doing it “through play.” Similarly, when people tell you direct instruction “works,” ask them what it worked for. If the answer was standardized tests, then you merely have an unsurprising match between method and outcome. Either way, bad teaching will be the result if a kindergarten teacher practices (or is forced to practice) any style in the extreme, and without an arsenal of creative tools for individualizing to children. For those brilliant kindergarten teachers who do possess such a toolbox, the standards and testing craze has tamped their best instincts into hiding.

I agree with Holly Robinson who says that, from a parent’s perspective, the immediate answer lies in finding the right fit for your child — a process we are right in the middle of with our own daughter. Unfortunately, good options are not nearly plentiful enough, and those that exist are not accessible enough to families and children that likely need them the most. In the meantime, my colleagues and I are trying to do our part by speaking out for differentiating education reform efforts for young children, incorporating modern child and brain development principles into teacher and principal prep programs, and consulting to early education initiatives about how to answer to the pressures of accountability without “killing kindergarteners” in the process.

Measuring in the Block Center

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Nothing ever becomes real ’til it is experienced.

― John Keats

I recently had the pleasant experience of observing inquiry centers in Marta Quinones and Maureen Duffy’s inclusion first grade class at P.S. 142 in Manhattan.
This spring, they decided to begin an inquiry project focused on “My Fit and Healthy Body.” This investigation came out of Maureen’s particular interest in physical fitness and sports. The children were picking up on her enthusiasm for running and exercising. The teachers also hoped that this study might address some of the children’s poor eating habits.

The three of us began by  brainstorming ideas for where this study might go.We created an anticipatory web, listing possible activities, trips, experts, reading and writing projects and math experiences.

The next step was to launch the study and to discover what the children already knew on the topic. Marta and Maureen began collecting the children’s  initial questions or, as they called it, “wonderings”.

The questions flowed from the class! When they organized the post- its  (small sticky-notes that the teachers used to record the students’ questions), the children and the teachers noticed was that there were many questions about bones. How do they break? Can they bend? How do they get fixed? How many do we have? How do we take care of them? Can they bend backwards? Do animals have the same bones as us? The questions were filling up the page of wonderings.

The direction of the study was now clear – finding out more about our bones!

On the morning of one of my school visits, I met with the two teachers for a planning meeting. I wanted to know what had happened since I was last there and what the teachers thought should be the “next steps” in the study. Marta noticed that a  group of children were attempting to construct a model of a human skeleton in the block center. Their project, however, was becoming unfocused and chaotic. We discussed some possible strategies for supporting  this project. We thought that they might take some time to look at and discuss  anatomical illustrations with the children. Perhaps, after looking at the drawings, they might want to create a ‘blueprint’ on mural paper for their block skelton. Marta thought that she would give this suggestion a try. Maureen planned on looking at xrays with a group of children.

Later in the day, I visited the classroom during Inquiry Center time. The children in the block center were working on their blueprint. They were using a foam rubber life-sized skeleton puzzle as a model for their construction. They also used a ruler to assist them in measuring unit blocks. The wanted to determine which block would match the size of the puzzle piece. They wanted it to be just the right size for their block skeleton.

As I sat on the side, observing, I was struck by the children’s collaboration and also by Marta’s calm, non-intrusive support of their work.

To my delight, I witnessed an unexpected example of children making an important discovery – Piaget’s theory about the conservation of matter! We often assume that children understand numerical consistency. Young children, however, don’t always understand that  five blocks arranged side by side will be just the same size as five blocks stacked vertically. In this little video clip from Marta and Maureen’s classroom, though, we can see how important a discovery it is that 11 inches stays the same, horizontally AND vertically!